About Kenji Mizoguchi

I have little to add to the excellent article on Mizoguchi posted here, but can direct other Mizoguchi fans to my website, jamescahill.info, to no. 19 in my list of Responses and Reminiscences, titled “Discovering Mizoguchi (and Movies),” which they may find entertaining. It is from a letter I wrote Mark le Fanu, author of a book about Mizoguchi, and tells of how I made this “discovery” in 1944 when I was only eighteen and totally innocent about movies, much less auteur theory. I was in the Army Japanese Language School, and we were shown “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum,” along with other Japanese films, for language practice—we saw each of them several times, and mostly slept through them after the first. But not with Zangiku monogatari, which kept me awake and transfixed each time. Also related there is how I met the great actor Hanayagi Shôtarô, the star of that film, while I was in the Occupation in Tokyo, and saw him perform. This account ends with my persuading Sheldon Renan, Director of the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, to organize (in 1969? 1970?) a Mizoguchi retrospective—first abroad?—and bring the aged but still active Yoda Yoshitaka, writer of most of Mizoguchi’s films and his collaborator, to Berkeley to give talks before each of the films. I was his interpreter for some of these. My posted account ends there, but I can add a bit to the one on this website, which attributes Mizoguchi’s “ideal of self-sacrificing womanhood” that underlies so many of his films to his early loss of his mother and sister. That may be true, but Yoda told us a different story. In his version, Mizoguchi had contracted syphilis early in his career, and was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that he had infected his first wife with it, so that she died from it, blind and out of her head. Whether or not this was true, Yoda said, Mizoguchi believed it to be true, and was ridden with feelings of deep guilt that pushed him into making the tragic plight of women in Japanese society, the terrible wrongs done to them, the theme of so many of his films. Yoda also showed us a documentary about Mizoguchi made in Japan after his death in which Tanaka Kinuyo, central figure in some of his finest films, was interviewed. Asked whether she herself had had a sexual relationship with Mizoguchi, she smiled a mysterious smile—who could do that more captivatingly than she?—and declined to answer. James Cahill